


In Search of Lost Time

by fro_baby



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Cisswap, F/F, Female Bucky Barnes, Female Steve Rogers, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internalized Homophobia, Modern Era, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-24
Updated: 2014-10-24
Packaged: 2018-02-22 09:21:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2502677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fro_baby/pseuds/fro_baby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The way Bucky’s eyes go wide and horrified feels like a knife in Stevie’s gut. “What do you mean? I thought-” She breaks off, her throat working soundlessly, and Stevie has to fight to ignore the way every fiber in her body is screaming at her to take Bucky into her arms, to kiss the fear off that mouth and chase that lost, desperate look out of those eyes.<br/>But she doesn’t. Can’t. Can only say, as gently as possible, “What’s going on, Buck?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Search of Lost Time

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, it's been a long time since I posted anything. Apologies for the delay, but I hope this little one-shot is worth the wait. A million thanks to Elsa and Willow for reading this over and dealing with my excessive feelings about closeted 1940s lesbians.  
> As the tags imply, this fic contains a brief suicide mention (neither of our heroes, don't worry), a brief mention of alcohol use, discussions of homophobia (both external and internalized), and discussions of Bucky's PTSD and amnesia.

The apartment is dim and quiet when Stevie steps inside. Faint sunlight and the muffled sounds of mid-morning traffic filter through the drawn curtains as she lets the door close behind her, taking care to dampen its heavy thud. Knowing Bucky, she’ll barely be awake, even though it’s closer to lunchtime than breakfast; the adjustment from an assassin’s schedule has been a long and slow one, and the whole being diurnal thing apparently takes some getting used to.

So does the whole big city, murder-free living thing. As she often does, Stevie silently thanks SHIELD’s now-defunct human resources department for finding her an apartment nice and far from busy streets and bad neighborhoods rife with gunfire. They’d been looking out for her PTSD, of course, but that pales in comparison to the demons inhabiting the place now; as Stevie makes her soundless way down the hall, she runs her hand over the week-old dent in the wall from when a car backfired down the block. She figures she’s not getting a cent of her deposit back, but she can’t really bring herself to mind.

She stops in her tracks, her eye caught by an unfamiliar reflection in the hall mirror. Resisting the immediate urge to start throwing punches—soldier's instincts, dormant but never dead, even in this uneasy peacetime—she breathes evenly and inspects the stranger in the mirror. Unzips its hoodie, blinks its eyes, brushes the errant hairs off the back of its neck, which feels oddly cool and prickly and naked. That girl in the mirror, she looks—well, pretty damn good, actually, her face free of its customary curtain of hair, the clean lines of the new cut revealing unexpected cheekbones and a strong jaw. She looks a bit like Stevie and a bit unlike her, boyish and womanly and practical and stylish all at once, like an ideal version of the real woman standing in the hallway. _Chic_ , the girl at the salon had said, and Stevie had been too surprised at hearing the word applied to herself to reply.

It's good, she reassures herself, fidgeting against the itch of the hairs that have fallen down the back of her shirt. Different is good, especially in these post-SHIELD days when she can never be sure who her enemies are. No wonder Natasha changes her hair so much.

Tearing herself away from the odd sight in the mirror, she peers into the bedroom and finds the bed empty and unmade. It's a sign of how far they've come that her heart doesn't claw its way up her throat at the sight; in those first few days it took all her self-restraint to keep from curling up at the foot of the bed like a watchdog, standing guard to make sure that Bucky didn't just evaporate into the night like a dream. _Space,_ she told herself, and spent four sleepless nights on the couch listening for the sound of Bucky's breathing from the other room. On the fifth day, as she had begun to contemplate moving her possessions out into the living room, Bucky grabbed her hand and pulled her into the bedroom.

"Shut up, punk," she told Stevie's shocked silence. "Ain't my fault your bed's too big for me." The words sounded so right in her mouth that Stevie couldn't find it in her heart to protest. And gradually endless nights of holding her body motionless beside Bucky's turned into dreamless sleep with warm breath on her ear and a metal arm around her waist turned into Stevie slipping noiselessly out of bed in the morning and returning from her run to find the world’s most terrifying assassin curled into the space where she used to be and snuffling, puppy-like, into her pillow.

No such luck this morning, but there’s a promising smell of coffee wafting from the kitchen, and Stevie can’t help but smile as she heads towards the doorway. Life hasn’t always been easy since Bucky came back, dripping rain onto her doorstep at 3 AM and staring at Stevie like she was a lifeboat in an empty ocean, but it’s mornings like this that make it all seem worth it; this feels like recovery, like domesticity, like this strange apartment and strange city and strange time have finally become something like a home—

She barely manages to dodge the knife that flies at her when she steps into the kitchen. It sinks into the doorpost where her head just was with a sickening thud, and without even thinking she dives behind the kitchen table. _Definitely no chance of that deposit,_ a distant part of her brain remarks as a bowl shatters against the tile floor inches from her feet, spattering milk and half-eaten cereal onto her jeans. She's got a running list in her head of everyone who might want to kill her, but she doesn't bother going through it; as far as she knows, there's only one assassin who would try to take her out with a bowl of cereal and bare feet in her kitchen.

“Bucky?” she says loudly, forcing herself to keep breathing normally and stop reaching for the shield that she knows isn’t there. Immediately, the rain of projectiles stops, and she risks a careful peek over the top of the table. There, as expected, is Bucky, half-hidden behind the kitchen counter, the steak knife in her hand poised to take off the top of Stevie’s head with devastating accuracy.

“Buck, it’s me,” Stevie says slowly, heart thundering in the back of her throat. She thinks she sees recognition in Bucky’s eyes, though even these days she can never be too sure. Still, that knife doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere soon, so she dares to straighten up slowly, her hands raised in surrender.

“Just me,” she repeats, eyes fixed on the knife suddenly wobbling in Bucky’s slackening grip. “It’s okay.”

“I...didn’t recognize you,” Bucky croaks at last, dropping the knife onto the countertop and stepping out into full view. (Stevie breathes a sigh of relief but does her best to hide it.)

“Thank goodness for that,” she says with a half-smile. At Bucky’s furrowed brows, she adds with a chuckle, “Well, y’know, I would’ve been kinda insulted if you’d done all that knowing it _was_ me.”

Those wide, startled eyes flicker from the knife still vibrating in the wall to the cereal catastrophe on the floor, and then Bucky sags against the counter, her mouth suddenly gone tight and lopsided with guilt. Inwardly, Stevie gives thanks for granite countertops that can withstand the grip of stressed-out bionic fingers; outwardly, she makes a soft noise in the back of her throat and slides out from behind the table.

“Hey, hey,” she murmurs, stepping cautiously towards the counter. “It’s all right, Buck, it’s no big deal. Don’t worry about it.”

“I forgot again,” Bucky mutters, her face scrunching painfully with anger and shame. “ _Again._ ”

“Shhhh.” Daring to move into Bucky’s space, Stevie pauses to ask, “Is this okay?” It took some getting used to, this careful routine of consent, the squashing of her tendency to jump thoughtlessly into every fray, the restraining of her instinct to touch Bucky immediately, constantly, as if to make sure that she was really there. But Sam had insisted, citing years of veteran therapy, and Stevie had practiced until asking first became second nature, and it's all worth it now that Bucky doesn't flinch away from her touch anymore.

When Bucky nods minutely, Stevie slides her arms around her shoulders (skin gliding against warm skin and cold metal) and asks again, “How about this?”

Another quick nod, and something like gratitude in those too-bright eyes. Running her fingers over the burning skin at the back of Bucky’s neck, Stevie murmurs, “What’s your name?”

“I know my name,” Bucky growls, not meeting Stevie’s eyes.

“I know you do, but you know it helps to say it,” Stevie says patiently. Another one of Sam's routines, though it's becoming mercifully less useful as the frozen stream of Bucky's memory starts to thaw. “Tell me.”

“Jacqueline Buchanan Barnes,” Bucky sighs, resting her forehead against Stevie’s, the skin hot and slightly damp with adrenaline.

“And my name?” Stevie whispers into the space between them.

“Stephanie Rogers,” Bucky says softly, her lips barely brushing the bridge of Stevie’s nose.

They stay like that, breathing back and forth in the silent, sunlit kitchen. Stevie is content to just be there, a soothing presence, a gentle weight tethering Bucky to earth, a rock for her to rest her head against. Glancing up, Stevie notices that Bucky’s eyes have fallen shut and reminds herself, as she so often does these days, to be grateful for small mercies.

After a few minutes, Stevie takes a breath and asks, “You okay?”

Those green eyes blink open, still wide and bright but without that unsettling wildness that always gives Stevie uncanny flashbacks to a bridge, a burning car, and a gun aimed at her chest.

“Yeah,” Bucky grunts, unsticking her forehead from Stevie’s and leaning back to inspect her. “Your hair. It’s different.”

“No kidding,” Stevie chuckles, suddenly self-conscious under the weight of Bucky’s appraising gaze. The big chop had been surprisingly nerve-wracking, but the butterflies in the barber’s chair were nothing compared to this. “Almost unrecognizable, huh?"

“Mmm.” Inside the circle of Stevie’s arms, Bucky lifts one hand to smooth a few blond strands off her forehead. “Why’d you do it?”

“It was getting too long,” Stevie shrugs. “Got in the way of training, and that big old braid was a huge pain. I kinda thought about it, y’know, in the old days-” (their code for the years before they were both turned into popsicles and their lives took a turn for the time travel) “-but it wasn’t. You know. Ladylike. It’s easier now—sort of in fashion, actually. Lots of girls with short hair. You know Mia Farrow?”

“Mm-mm.” Bucky shakes her head absently; she’s more interested in running her fingers through the newly shorn hair at the back of Stevie’s neck.

Fighting back a pleasant shiver, Stevie rambles on, “Natasha made me watch Rosemary’s Baby a few months back. Scary stuff, you might like it. We should watch it sometime—some, uh, other time.”

She trails off, thoroughly distracted by the thoroughly distracting sensation of Bucky’s fingertips against her scalp. It takes a good chunk of her superhuman self-control to resist the urge to lean into Bucky’s touch like a pleased cat. Instead, she says, “You, uh. You like it?”

“Well, it makes you look less like the dairy queen of the Wisconsin county fair, so that’s something.” Bucky grins, and Stevie feels her heart go tight like a fist because there it is, one of those flashes of clarity, those glimpses of what lies behind the many layers of anger and trauma and brainwashing, those reminders of the way things used to be. They’ve been happening more and more often lately, and Stevie’s starting to wonder if that ache in her chest is what hope feels like.

“Thanks,” she snorts, rolling her eyes, and Bucky’s grin goes lopsided and painfully fond.

“It’s cute, Stevie,” she smiles, pushing her fingers through the thick, longer hairs on top of Stevie’s head. “Real cute.”

“Thanks,” Stevie says again, with feeling this time. Her fingers fiddle absently with a mussed strand of Bucky’s hair, so different now from the shoulder-length cascade of dark waves she had in the old days (maintained, of course, by a strict nightly regimen of curlers that Stevie was absolutely not allowed to make fun of). Now it barely grazes her chin—grown out, Stevie supposes, from when they shaved her head for—for whatever. They don't ever talk about it, and Stevie tries not to think about it too much.

Her thoughts must show in her face, because the corners of Bucky's mouth drift downwards to match her pensive frown, those green eyes sliding sideways until they alight on the porcelain shards scattered across the kitchen floor.

"Hey, I'm sorry about your bowl." Bucky's face goes all closed and blank, like she's expecting straps on her wrists and a biteguard in her mouth and god knows how many volts of electric pain between her ears. If Zola weren't already dead, that look would be enough to make Stevie want to kill him at least five times; as it is, she has to fight the urge to look up every surviving Hydra agent and start stacking bodies six feet high. And it scares her a little, this intense need for—not justice, she knows it's not justice, it's not any of those calm, detached words like duty or truth or honor. It's blood she wants, lots of it, preferably on her hands, and that scares the living hell out of her. Though, to be honest, what scares her even more is the thought of what kind of vengeance Bucky might want.

Still, she forces those thoughts out of her head, pulls on a fairly convincing smile, and says, "I said don't worry about it, Buck, I'm serious. I’ll replace it, you wouldn't believe how cheap that stuff is now." Besides, she adds mentally, they can afford it, thanks to SHIELD's generous pension/severance package/hush money/whatever the hell you want to call it. In the old days, Stevie would have turned down the money without a thought, but that was before she had a 95-year-old roommate who couldn't be left alone for too long and routinely punched holes through walls. Her priorities sure as hell have changed, and that doesn't scare her as much as it probably should.

Gradually, that horrible stonewall look fades from Bucky’s face, to be replaced by the fond smirk reserved exclusively for yanking Stevie’s chain. “So you think you’re some kinda big shot now, huh?”

Stevie manages to grin, swallowing back the urge to cry with relief that’s been building steadily at the back of her throat. It doesn’t make any sense, she _knows_ it doesn’t, but every time Bucky has one of these—these attacks, Stevie can’t help but worry that she won’t come back from it. Because losing Bucky to the gaping mouth of a snowy gorge was bad enough the first time around; Stevie doesn’t know if she could stand to lose her again to the awful void of amnesia. A second time might just be too much to bear.

“Maybe I do, Barnes.” She squares her shoulders, cocky and aggressive and full of shit like a tiny kid from Brooklyn who threatened to beat the living hell out of every man who catcalled her on the street. “You wanna make somethin’ of it?”

They’re both grinning now, falling into the easy banter of the days when they thought toughness meant mimicking the scrappy boys who pulled their pigtails in class. Of course, they’ve both long since learned that being strong and being a woman is a lot more complicated than acting like a man, but the inside joke is still theirs to share. In moments like these, they can drop their soldier-trained blankness and slip back into a time and a place few people still remember: long-forgotten slang jumping easily onto their tongues, Brooklyn accents worn like shields and security blankets.

And then Bucky cocks her head, her shit-eating grin growing into something more serious, and says, “Hey, Stevie. Can I ask you something?”

Stevie’s first instinct is to reply with another joke, but something about the way Bucky’s eyes are tracing her face, soft and thoughtful and a little bit hesitant, makes her sober up. “Sure, Buck. Anything.”

“Can I,” Bucky begins slowly, one hand reaching up to cradle Stevie’s jaw, “Can I kiss you?”

It is, Stevie thinks with the only small, distant part of her brain that isn’t filled with white noise, a wonder that her mouth doesn’t drop open in shock. The rest of her face, however, more than makes up for it; her eyes go huge and stare rather inelegantly back at Bucky, and she’s pretty certain that she’s turned red from the base of her throat to the tips of her ears.

The answer is burning at the forefront of her mind, thrumming through her body like a plucked chord, _yes yes of course yes_ , but all she manages to say is: “What?”

“I know you’ve been. You know. Waiting.” Bucky absently tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, her eyes not meeting Stevie’s. “And I appreciate it, kid, I really do. Right when I got here, I—I wasn’t in good shape, y’know, to start things up again. But I’m remembering… _things_ pretty good now, and I—I think I’m ready.”

“Ready for _what_?” Stevie barely chokes the words out around the lump building in her throat, her heart sinking inexorably towards her feet because Bucky isn’t making any damn sense, and she’s jumped off buildings that were less terrifying than this.

“To be your girl.” Bucky finally looks up, her smile crumpling into a perplexed frown at Stevie’s shocked expression. “You know. Go steady. Like we used to, in the old days.”

“Buck,” Stevie says, and then has to stop, her voice crumbling under the weight of the hope and longing and terror clawing up the back of her throat. Because _god,_ does she want it to be true; she’d give everything to live in whatever fantasy world Bucky’s built for them. For a split second she considers slipping into the lie, reshaping the past into what she wishes it had been, but she chokes on the half-truths climbing into her mouth.

“Buck, that’s not—we never went steady,” she says finally, the words hard and clumsy like marbles on her tongue.

“What?” The way Bucky’s eyes go wide and horrified feels like a knife in Stevie’s gut. “What do you mean? I thought-” She breaks off, her throat working soundlessly, and Stevie has to fight to ignore the way every fiber in her body is screaming at her to take Bucky into her arms, to kiss the fear off that mouth and chase that lost, desperate look out of those eyes.

But she doesn’t. Can’t. Can only say, as gently as possible, “What’s going on, Buck?”

“It doesn’t make _sense_ ,” Bucky grits out through clenched teeth, pressing her hands to her temples, her eyes scrunching shut. Instinctively, Stevie reaches for Bucky’s hands—and _god,_ how she wants to hold them and kiss every finger until that look of horrible incomprehension fades from Bucky’s face—but stops herself, fingers hovering just short of metal and flesh. She can’t grab her now, not like this, not without asking; it would do more harm than good. So she just waits, heart screaming somewhere in her chest, for Bucky’s next move.

“If we weren’t going steady,” Bucky says at last, turning agonized eyes on Stevie’s flushed face, “Then why—why do I have all these memories? Stevie, why do I remember being in love with you?”

“I—what?” Stevie stammers, her heart throwing itself suddenly against her sternum, her mind one giant, howling blank.

“I used to help you get dolled up for parties.” Bucky’s eyes have gone wide and faraway, like she’s turned a corner in her mind and found an unexpected room full of memories. “You fought me like hell when I tried to get lipstick on you, but all I could think about was how damn beautiful you were. You took me to Coney Island and sketched me on the beach, and it was the best day of my whole summer. We slept in my _bed_ together, when your mom was workin’ the late shift and you were too sick to stay home alone. And, and, when I had to ship out to Europe and leave you behind—that was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Christ, when I got captured, all I could think was that I’d never see you again…and you wanna tell me that I was never your girl?”

“You-” Stevie swallows hard, because there’s an oncoming wave of tears threatening to crash over her at any minute. “You never said. You never said anything.”

“We _kissed_ ,” Bucky says abruptly, like a realization—no, more like an accusation. “We did. I remember that.” And then Stevie understands, suddenly, what’s happening in Bucky’s mind: a broken dam, a rush of memories floating in a thawing stream, sharp and vivid but spinning along in isolation, without connection, without meaning. Out of context, out of time, this handful of fractured moments might add up to a portrait of lovers, simple and easy and free of all the secrets two girls in love during the Depression had to keep. God knows Stevie hates to shatter the illusion, but she can’t stop herself.

“We were drunk, Buck.” Stevie presses her hands to her eyes, hardly daring to put words to a memory that she has carefully not allowed herself to think about for years. But something inside her forces her to go on, like picking the scab off a 75-year-old wound. “It was my eighteenth birthday, remember? You got me drunk as hell, and we were walking home from the bar-”

“I was carrying you, pal,” Bucky interrupts, a thoroughly comforting note of certainty in her voice. “As I recall, you overheard some fella making a rude remark about my dress and tried to sock him. Smacked your damn fool face against the bar, so guess who had to drag you home?”

“And you wanted to stop along the way for a smoke,” Stevie fills in slowly, lowering her hands from her face and meeting Bucky’s eyes.

“Under the L train,” Bucky nods. “And it was dark under there, and we were drunk, and you were so-”

She breaks off, her voice cracking, and all Stevie can do is nod and mumble, “I remember.”

“So—what did that mean, then?” Bucky collects herself, folding her arms across her chest and pinning Stevie to the spot with her steely gaze.

Stevie pauses, because it’s a little scary how close she just was to spitting out another lie. They’ve been a part of her since she was a kid, these little white lies: yes, Bucky, I think the boy who works at the soda fountain is cute; yes, Bucky, I’d like to go on a double date with you and a couple of off-duty sailors; yes, ma, I do want to find a nice fella and settle down; no, Bucky, don’t worry, I’ll be fine, you have fun in Europe and give them Germans what-for. After a lifetime of lying to the people closest to her, telling the Army that she was from Paramus was a piece of cake.

But if there’s one thing she’s started to figure out about this new time she’s trying to call home, it’s that maybe, just maybe, she doesn’t have to keep lying anymore.

And so she takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and says, “It meant _everything_ , Buck.”

“So why-” Bucky waves her hands vaguely, staring at Stevie with a kind of hurt incomprehension that makes Stevie’s heart curl up in a ball and whimper. “Why didn’t we do it again? Why didn’t you _say_ somethin’?”

“You don’t remember what it was like.” Stevie frowns, recalling the slow feeling of dread that crystallized in her stomach the first time she caught herself eyeing a cute girl in class. “You couldn’t—girls couldn’t just go steady with other girls. You remember those awful dime novels? We bought one once when we were kids, read it behind a dumpster in an alley so no one’d catch us with it. It was called-”

“ _Sin Sisters,_ ” Bucky supplies immediately, blinking at the suddenness of the memory. “Yeah, it was real dramatic, wasn’t it? One of the girls died, right?”

“Killed herself,” Stevie confirms grimly. “And her girlfriend went nuts and got locked up. And, look, I know it was just a stupid pulp novel, but Christ, it scared me. Those were the only options for girls—girls like me, back then. You lost it, you died, or you gave it up and settled for some guy. I was terrified, Buck, you gotta understand. I thought there was something so wrong with me, and I never thought—well, you were so boy-crazy back then, I thought there was no way. And even if you had, y’know, felt the same, you had your life and your family and your job with the Army and I couldn’t ask you to give all that up. Not for me.”

To her surprise, she can feel tears pricking hot and sharp in her eyes, the sudden weight of a lifetime of fear and secrets crashing back down onto her with unpleasant vividness. But this time, she’s not sobbing under her bed with a half-written love letter crumpled in her hands; this time, she’s standing in a sunlit kitchen with the haircut she never dared to get and the girl she never dared to love standing just inches away, smiling the softest, saddest smile she’s ever seen.

“I would’ve done it,” Bucky says quietly, taking a step towards Stevie until their feet are practically touching, bare toes to battered sneakers on the cold tile floor. “For you. I would’ve done anything. I remember that.”

And Stevie’s breath catches in her throat because now Bucky is leaning towards her again, and those green eyes flicker very deliberately down to Stevie’s lips, and she’s sliding her arms around Stevie’s waist and murmuring, “This okay?” And it might be a little pathetic, because Stevie’s whole body might just be trembling, all 200 pounds of muscle and bone and iron-tight reflexes undone by the simple look on Bucky’s face, the way she licks her lips and-

“Wait.” Stevie carefully takes Bucky’s wrists and moves them away to a safe distance, where she can think without the strange sensation of flesh and metal flexing against her skin and driving every sensible thought out of her head. She keeps her eyes fixed on those wrists, one absorbing the brilliant morning sunlight, the other reflecting it, as she says, “Look, you—you said you remembered having these feelings. In the old days. Do you still have them?”

“What?” When Stevie finally looks up, there’s incredulity painted all over Bucky’s face. “Of course I do, Stevie, what the hell are you saying?”

“I just-” Stevie breaks off and swallows hard, because the possibility of what she’s about to say is almost too terrifying to put into words. But she has to, and so she does: “I need to know that you still want this. That you’re not, I don’t know, pretending so I’ll be happy, or so that things will be like they were in the old days, or-”

“Rogers, you are a _complete_ idiot-”

“ _Please_ , Bucky.” Stevie can feel her face contorting itself into what Bucky once called the pathetically earnest puppy look, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but this. “This is important. You have to promise me.”

“I promise, Stevie,” Bucky says at last, an overwhelming note of fondness in her voice. “Now can you stop being such a damn fat-head and kiss me already?”

“I…think I can manage that, yeah.” Stevie guides Bucky’s hands back to her waist and lets herself be pulled close against that lean body, her hands bracing against the granite countertop as Bucky leans up and presses their lips together.

For half a second, it feels like a flashback; Stevie can almost hear the roar of the L train and feel the hot burn of alcohol and cigarette smoke searing the back of her throat. It takes a considerable effort to keep herself from drowning in the memory, but she digs her fingers into the countertop and forces herself back into the present. Because there’s no train rattling overhead, no cheap whiskey glowing in her veins, no lipstick smearing scarlet with the blood from her split lip, no need to listen for approaching footsteps on the rain-slick midnight sidewalk.

No terror. No shame. Just Bucky, here and real and pushing herself eagerly against Stevie’s body, fingers wrapped around the bottom edge of her shirt, lips pressing warm breath into Stevie’s mouth as she tilts her head to fit their lips together more firmly. Kissing like puzzle pieces, like devouring, like twenty years of secrets and sixty-five more of waiting, like not having to wait or lie or hide anymore.

And then Bucky pulls away, brow furrowing, and Stevie realizes that she’s shaking, hard and sudden, and there are tears in her eyes and tears on her face and uneven breaths jerking out of her mouth that might just sound like sobs.

“Stevie?” Bucky says softly, and she sounds so careful and concerned and uncertain all at once that Stevie starts to cry harder.

“Sorry,” she manages thickly, swiping furiously at the tears that just won’t stop flowing. “I—this is probably really weird, I’m so sorry—I’m not—I’m really happy, I promise, I just-”

“Hey,” Bucky says gently, tightening her grip minutely on Stevie’s waist. “I’m still not totally clear on what passes for normal these days, but I’m pretty sure that a 95-year-old super soldier smooching another 95-year-old ex-assassin is already pretty damn weird.”

Stevie can’t help but laugh, small and wobbly and damp, and the grin that blooms on Bucky’s face is almost enough to stop the flood of tears. Carefully, Bucky lifts her right hand and slides it into Stevie’s hair, running her fingers through the prickly hairs at the nape of her neck.

“This okay?” Bucky murmurs, and Stevie just nods, letting her eyes slide shut and pressing her head back into Bucky’s touch with a small sigh.

“What’s with the waterworks, kiddo?” Bucky asks lightly, smoothing her fingers across Stevie’s scalp. “I’m not that bad of a kisser, am I?”

Stevie’s eyes snap open, but Bucky’s face is full of mischief—and a clear note of concern.

“Believe me, Buck, your kissing is far from a problem,” Stevie chuckles, very nearly succeeding at keeping a watery waver out of her voice. “It’s just—I—this is a lot. For me. A lot to—y’know, process.”

“Does that mean you want to stop?” Bucky’s voice is still light and even, no hint of disappointment or disapproval. Stevie’s so grateful that she very nearly starts crying again.

“Yeah, for now. If that’s okay. There are just a lot of—I have a lot of feelings associated with these—well, feelings.” Stevie waves her hands vaguely, trying to find words for the unhappy weight pressing against her lungs, the voice in the back of her head that keeps telling her to stop, to hide, to bury this with all the other memories and never speak or think of it again. Bucky’s looking pretty perplexed, so she tries again: “It’s like—I have a lot of good feelings. About you. Really, really good feelings, but—well, all my life, I learned that those were bad feelings. I thought that I was supposed to feel ashamed and frightened and _bad_ because of the way that I felt about you. So now, even though I don’t have to feel scared and ashamed anymore, it’s kind of hard to separate all those good feelings from the bad. Am I making any sense?”

“Sure,” Bucky nods, serious and thoughtful. “Stevie, I’m sorry I don’t remember how hard it was in the old days-”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Stevie says hastily. “I don’t want—you don’t need to remember that stuff. They’re not good memories. I’m working on forgetting them—or making them stay memories, at least. Not letting them get all tangled up in the present. It…it might take a while,” she adds hesitantly.

“That’s okay,” Bucky says immediately, squeezing gently at the back of Stevie’s neck. “You’re helpin’ me work through a couple things; I figure I can do the same for you.”

The sheepish grin on Bucky’s face is so perfect that Stevie can’t resist the urge to wrap her arms around her and hold on tight, burying her face in Bucky’s shoulder with a faint snuffling noise that makes the other woman laugh in surprise.

“Alright there, Rogers?” Bucky asks fondly, pressing her metal hand into the dip of Stevie’s lower back and resting her chin on her shoulder.

“Yeah,” Stevie says firmly, tucking her face into the crook of Bucky’s neck. “More than alright. Good. Really good.”

“Me too,” Bucky replies softly, and the words are enough to chase that dark feeling of dread clean out of Stevie’s ribcage.

“I’m real glad you came back, Buck,” she murmurs into the warm skin of Bucky’s neck, letting her eyes slip shut.

“Me too, Stevie,” Bucky whispers, the smile bright and clear in her voice.


End file.
